The Pragmatic Engineer
Read bullet-point summaries of The Pragmatic Engineer on software engineering, leadership, Big Tech, AI tools, productivity, and startups.
Episodes
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Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majors
Charity Majors, co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb, discusses how AI is reshaping software engineering, drawing on her background building Parse, working at
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Formal methods with Hillel Wayne
This episode features Hillel Wayne, a formal methods consultant and author of Logic for Programmers, discussing formal verification, the Crossover Project
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From "napkin math" to turbopuffer
Simon Ericson, founder and CEO of Turbopuffer, traces his path from building games in PowerPoint and FrontPage as a child in Denmark to competitive programming
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The Pragmatic Engineer AMA
This is an AMA episode of The Pragmatic Engineer podcast where Gergely Orosz answers subscriber questions read by Vladimir Gignak (CTO at Wordsmith), covering
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How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industry
Kent Beck, a foundational figure in software engineering, reflects on a 50-year career spanning Smalltalk, design patterns, test-driven development (TDD)
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Tech interviews with NeetCode
Neet (Nav Singh), creator of NeetCode, discusses why DSA interviews persist despite AI coding tools, what interview prep actually teaches, and why personality
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Slow down to speed up: AI and software engineering
Meta's engineering culture is collapsing under AI-driven mismanagement, culminating in a catastrophic Instagram security breach where attackers could take over
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CI/CD with Robert Erez
Rob Erez, a CI/CD expert and early engineer at Octopus Deploy, joins the podcast to share hard-won lessons from over a decade of building deployment tooling at
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Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightower
Kelsey Hightower's career is a case study in how non-traditional paths, relentless skill-building, and public work can lead to the top of the tech industry
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Building OpenCode with Dax Raad
Dax Raad is co-founder of OpenCode, the most popular open-source AI coding harness, which grew from 650,000 to nearly 8 million monthly active users in under a
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Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhl
Rust is a systems programming language that has surged in popularity by offering something rare: the reliability of high-level languages with the performance of
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TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsberg
Anders Hejlsberg is one of the most influential language designers in computing history, responsible for creating Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C , and TypeScript. Over
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Building Pi, and what makes self-modifying software so fascinating
Pi is a minimalist, self-modifying coding agent built by Mario Zner in Austria, designed as a reaction against bloated AI coding tools. It has become the engine
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Designing Data-intensive Applications with Martin Kleppmann
Martin Kleppmann is the author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA), a widely influential book on the principles behind reliable, scalable, and
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DHH: how to escape the "Apple bubble"
DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) discusses breaking free from Apple's ecosystem and embracing a multi-computer lifestyle, arguing that developers and tech
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DHH’s new way of writing code
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of 37signals, went from publicly bashing AI coding tools on Lex Fridman's podcast six
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Martin Fowler & Kent Beck: Frameworks for reinventing software, again and again
Martin Fowler and Kent Beck — two of the 17 signatories of the Agile Manifesto 25 years ago — reflect on how their ideas (Agile, TDD, refactoring, XP) have
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Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber’s first CTO)
Thuan Pham, Uber's first CTO (2013–2020), recounts his journey from fleeing Vietnam as a child refugee to leading one of the most complex engineering
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Chip Huyen: Building when it feels like there's nothing left to build - The Pragmatic Summit
Chip Huyen — on building when AI can replicate anything
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Nicole Forsgren: Leading high-performing engineering teams in the age of AI - The Pragmatic Summit
Nicole Forsgren, author of Fricticless and Accelerate, now works at Google focusing on developer experience and how AI is reshaping software delivery. She spoke
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Product-minded engineers in an AI-native world
A panel discussion at The Pragmatic Summit featuring Tuomas Artman (co-founder and CTO of Linear), Michelle Lim (co-founder of Flint), and Drew Hoskins (author
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Simon Willison: Engineering practices that make coding agents work - The Pragmatic Summit
Simon Willison — creator of Django, co-founder of Lanyard, and maintainer of Datasette — now writes more code on his phone than on his laptop, using AI coding
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Building WhatsApp with Jean Lee
Jean Lee was engineer number 19 at WhatsApp, joining in 2012 when the company was still relatively unknown in the US but growing rapidly in Europe and India.
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From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yegge
Steve Yegge is a 40-year software engineering veteran (Amazon, Google), known for his influential blog posts and brutal honesty about the industry. He recently
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Uber: Leading engineering through an agentic shift - The Pragmatic Summit
Uber has undergone a major shift from using AI primarily for customer-facing systems (like matching and pricing) to embedding agentic AI deeply into the
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Ramp: Lessons from Building a New AI Product - The Pragmatic Summit
Ramp's AI-first transformation: Ramp is a finance platform with 50,000+ customers that automates expense management, accounting, and financial workflows using
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Lessons from building Vercel v0 and the d0 agent - The Pragmatic Summit
Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel, discusses how his team builds and ships AI-powered products—specifically D0 (an internal data agent) and V0 (a public-facing app
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Building Claude Code with Boris Cherny
Boris Cherny is the creator and head of Claude Code at Anthropic, previously a Principal Engineer at Meta where he led code quality across Instagram, Facebook
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Welcome - The Pragmatic Summit
This is the opening address at The Pragmatic Summit on 11 February 2026 in San Francisco, delivered by Gergely Orosz, creator of The Pragmatic Engineer
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Mitchell Hashimoto’s new way of writing code
Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp and creator of Ghostty, reflects on building foundational cloud infrastructure tools, the near-sale of HashiCorp to
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Building world-class engineering teams in the age of AI - The Pragmatic Summit
Thomas Dohmke (cofounder & CEO of Entire, former CEO of GitHub) and Rajeev Rajan (CTO of Atlassian) discuss what it means to build world-class engineering teams
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Data vs Hype: How Orgs Actually Win with AI - The Pragmatic Summit
Context and framing: This is a keynote by Laura Tacho, CTO, at The Pragmatic Summit, drawing an extended analogy between the space race and the current AI era.
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OpenAI: How AI is reshaping the craft of building software - The Pragmatic Summit
OpenAI's internal engineering culture has shifted dramatically in the last 6 months, with AI coding tools evolving from autocomplete-like helpers into
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The programming language after Kotlin – with the creator of Kotlin
Andrey Brela, the creator of Kotlin, discusses his journey designing one of the world's most popular programming languages and his new project, CodeSpeak — a
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The third golden age of software engineering – thanks to AI, with Grady Booch
Grady Booch, a foundational figure in software engineering (co-creator of UML, IBM Fellow, pioneer of object-oriented design), argues that AI is not ending
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The creator of OpenClaw: "I ship code I don't read"
Peter Steinberger built PSPDFKit, a PDF rendering framework used on over a billion devices, ran it for 13 years, burned out, sold his shares, and stepped away
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How AWS S3 is built
AWS S3 is the world's largest cloud storage service, holding over 500 trillion objects across hundreds of exabytes, served from tens of millions of hard drives
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The history of servers, the cloud, and what’s next – with Oxide
Brian Cantrell's journey from Sun Microsystems to Oxide traces the evolution of servers, cloud infrastructure, and computing hardware from the 1990s to today
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Why Rust is coming to the Linux kernel
Rust is already inside the Linux kernel and growing. The kernel now contains roughly 25,000 lines of Rust, mostly bindings rather than core functionality, but
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Being a founding engineer at an AI startup
Michelle Lim was the founding software engineer at Warp (originally called Denver), an AI-powered terminal startup, and is now the founder of Flint, which
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Code security for software engineers
Johannes Dahse, VP of Code Security at Sonar and a security expert with 20 years of experience, explains what every software engineer should know about writing
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How AI will change software engineering – with Martin Fowler
Martin Fowler is a highly influential software engineer and author known for his work on agile, refactoring, and software architecture. He was one of the 17
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Netflix’s Engineering Culture
Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone discusses the company's unique engineering culture, the technical challenges of scaling live streaming to tens of millions of
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From Swift to Mojo and high-performance AI Engineering with Chris Lattner
Chris Lattner is one of the most influential software engineers of the past two decades — he created LLVM (the compiler infrastructure behind Swift, Rust, and
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Beyond Vibe Coding with Addy Osmani
Addy Osmani, a long-time Chrome team engineer and author of Beyond Vibe Coding, argues that vibe coding and AI-assisted engineering are fundamentally different
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Google’s engineering culture
Google is one of the world's largest and most influential tech companies, with roughly 182,000 employees across Alphabet, around 50,000+ engineers, and 3–4
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Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript and AI with Armin Ronacher
Armin Ronacher is the creator of Flask, founding engineer at Sentry, and now building a new startup. He discusses how AI coding tools are reshaping software
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High growth startups: Uber and CloudKitchens with Charles-Axel Dein
Charles Axel Dein was engineer 20 at Uber in 2012, grew with the company through its hypergrowth phase, and now works at CloudKitchens. He's also the maintainer
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Code Complete with Steve McConnell
Steve McConnell wrote Code Complete—a 900-page definitive guide to software construction—early in his career, about five years out of college, after discovering
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The state of VC within software and AI startups – with Peter Walker
Peter Walker, head of insights at Carta — a platform used by over 50% of US startups to manage equity and funding data — walks through what the data reveals
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Measuring the impact of AI on software engineering – with Laura Tacho
Laura Tacho, CTO at DX — a company that measures developer productivity with data — discusses what the actual evidence shows about AI's impact on software
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Amazon, Google and Vibe Coding with Steve Yegge
Steve Yegge is a veteran software engineer who spent 7 years at Amazon, 13 at Google, and is now building AI tools at Sourcegraph. He's widely known for two
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What is a Principal Engineer at Amazon? With Steve Huynh
Steve Huynh spent 17.5 years at Amazon, working across many teams including Kindle, Prime Video, Amazon Local, Amazon Restaurants, Amazon Tickets, and live
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How Linux is built with Greg Kroah-Hartman
Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation fellow, explains how the Linux kernel is built, maintained, and evolved by thousands of
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How AI is changing software engineering at Shopify with Farhan Thawar
Shopify has gone all-in on AI, and its head of engineering, Farhan Thawar, explains how the company is reshaping its engineering culture, tools, and hiring
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Software engineering with LLMs in 2025: reality check (at LDX3 by LeadDev)
In mid-2025, there is a striking gap between the hype from AI company executives and the actual experience of software engineers using AI tools day to day. The
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Things you didn't know about GitHub - with CEO Thomas Dohmke
GitHub turned 17 years old in 2025, and CEO Thomas Dohmke—a 16-year GitHub user, 7-year employee, and 4-year CEO—walked through the platform's history, internal
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TDD, AI agents and coding with Kent Beck
Kent Beck, creator of Extreme Programming, co-author of the Agile Manifesto, and pioneer of TDD, says that after 52 years of coding, he's never had more fun
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50 Years of Microsoft and Developer Tools with Scott Guthrie
Scott Guthrie, who joined Microsoft in 1997 and now leads cloud and AI, traces the company's 50-year arc from a developer tools startup to a cloud and AI
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From Software Engineer to AI Engineer – with Janvi Kalra
Janvi Kalra is a software engineer turned AI engineer who interned at Google and Microsoft, joined Coda as an early engineer, became one of its first AI
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How Kubernetes is Built with Kat Cosgrove
Kubernetes is the second-largest open source project in the world (after Linux) and has become the de facto standard for managing containerized applications at
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Building Windsurf with Varun Mohan
Windsurf is an AI-native IDE built by a team with deep infrastructure and autonomous vehicle backgrounds, and this episode explores the engineering challenges
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How to work better with Product, as an Engineer with Ebi Atawodi
Ebi Atawodi (Director of Product Management at YouTube Studio, previously at Netflix and Uber) and the host (an engineering manager at Uber at the time) recount
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Building Reddit’s iOS and Android app
Reddit's native iOS and Android apps are massive — each around 2.5 million lines of code, with 500+ screens and 200+ mobile engineers — and between 2021 and
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Working at Amazon as a software engineer – with Dave Anderson
Dave Anderson spent over 12 years at Amazon as a software development manager (SDM) and director of engineering before retiring early. He offers a candid look
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The Philosophy of Software Design – with John Ousterhout
John Ousterhout, professor of computer science at Stanford and author of A Philosophy of Software Design, discusses the state of software design, the impact of
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Stacked diffs and tooling at Meta with Tomas Reimers
Tomas Reimers, former Meta engineer and co-founder of Graphite, explains why Meta built its own deeply integrated internal developer tooling instead of using
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Building Figma Slides with Noah Finer and Jonathan Kaufman
Figma Slides launched in April 2024, just over a year after it started as a hackathon project, and has already seen users create more than 4.5 million slide
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Developer Experience at Uber with Gautam Korlam
Gautam Korlam spent nearly a decade at Uber, rising from Android engineer 8 to Principal Engineer, working on developer experience and internal tooling at
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Design-first software engineering: Craft – with Balint Orosz
Balint Orosz is a designer-first engineer and founder of Craft, a note-taking app that won Apple's Mac App of the Year. He sits in an unusual space between
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The man behind the Big Tech comics – with Manu Cornet
Manu Cornet is a senior software engineer and cartoonist who spent 14 years at Google working on Gmail, Android, Chrome, and Google Search, and later worked at
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Developer productivity with Nicole Forsgren (the creator of DORA)
Nicole Forsgren is one of the world's leading experts on developer productivity — she co-created the DORA framework, co-authored the book Accelerate, and has
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Live streaming at world-record scale with Ashutosh Agrawal (ex-Jio / Disney+ Hotstar)
Ashutosh Agrawal was a software architect and principal engineer at JioCinema (now Disney+ Hotstar), where he helped architect the system that set a world
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AI Engineering with Chip Huyen
Chip Huyen, author of the O'Reilly book AI Engineering, joins to discuss what AI engineering is, how it differs from traditional ML engineering, and practical
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Two developers built a game that sold 1M copies. How?
Jonas Tyroller, one of the two developers behind the indie strategy game Thronefall, walks through how the game was built, how it sold over a million copies in
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Observability: the present and future, with Charity Majors
Charity Majors is a veteran infrastructure engineer (ex-Parse, ex-Facebook) and co-founder of Honeycomb, an observability startup. She’s also the author of
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“The Coding Machine” at Meta – with Michael Novati
Michael Novati spent eight years at Meta (2009–2017), rising from intern to E7 (principal engineer equivalent) in just six years, and became the company's 1
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Confessions of a Big Tech recruiter – with Blake Stockman
Blake Stockman spent 12 years as a tech recruiter at Google, Meta, Uber, Flexport, and Y Combinator before leaving the field to study law. In this candid
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Shipping projects at Big Tech with Sean Goedecke
Shipping at big tech is a social construct, not just a technical milestone. Sean Goedecke, a Staff Software Engineer at GitHub with prior experience at Zendesk
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How Notion Builds Their iOS and Android Apps
Notion's mobile team — just 11 engineers split across iOS and Android — builds and maintains apps used by tens of millions of users, with about half of all new
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Evolution of software architecture with the co-creator of UML (Grady Booch)
Grady Booch is a legendary software engineer who built his first computer at age 12, co-created UML, originated object-oriented analysis and design (the Booch
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Linear: move fast with little process (with first Engineering Manager Sabin Roman)
Linear is a small, profitable, full-remote startup (60+ people, 25 engineers) that has built a popular project and issue-tracking tool used by 10,000+
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Promotions and tooling at Google (with Irina Stanescu, Ex-Google)
Irina Stanescu spent over 14 years as a software engineer and engineering leader at Google and Uber, and now works as an engineering leadership coach. In this
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Twisting the rules of building software: Bending Spoons (the team behind Evernote)
Bending Spoons is an 11-year-old Milan-based tech company that has grown from five developers building small mobile apps into a 450+ person organization
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Efficient scaleups in 2024 vs 2021: Sourcegraph (with CEO & Co-founder Quinn Slack)
Quinn Slack, CEO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, joins The Pragmatic Engineer to discuss how the realities of running a tech scale-up have shifted between 2021
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AI tools for software engineers, but without the hype – with Simon Willison (Co-Creator of Django)
Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django framework and a prolific open-source contributor, has been experimenting with large language models (LLMs) for software
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The software engineering industry in 2024: Q&A
Will tech progress continue in a high interest rate environment?
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The software engineering industry in 2024: what changed, why, and what is next (Craft Conference)
The software engineering industry in 2024 is undergoing a major shift that feels new but has strong parallels to the dot-com bust era of the early 2000s.
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Systems Design Interview: Volume 2 Review and Payments Chapter Deepdive
This is a review of System Design Interview Volume 2 by Alex Xu (co-authored with Sam), a 400-page book that is the 1 Amazon US bestseller in computer science
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Getting Into Big Tech: From Startups in Mexico to Amazon and Microsoft as a Software Engineer
Jorge is a software engineer who moved from Colombia to Mexico, then to the US, working his way up from small local startups to Intel, Amazon, and now
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How to Negotiate a Big Tech Offer as a Software Engineer - with @RahulPandeyrkp
Negotiating a Big Tech software engineering offer is one of the highest-leverage career moves you can make, and this episode breaks down how to do it
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From Software Engineer to Engineering Manager with Annie Vella
Annie Vella's path to engineering management was shaped by a deep love of technical problem-solving, years of deliberate skill-building, and a pivotal moment
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The Trimodal Nature of Software Engineer Compensation: Why Positions Pay a (Very) Different Salary
Software engineering compensation in Europe and Canada follows a trimodal distribution — three distinct salary bands that can differ by 2–5x for the same role
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Confessions from a Big Tech Hiring Manager: Tips for Software Engineering Interviews
Gergely Orosz, a former hiring manager at Skyscanner and Uber, shares insights and advice from the other side of the table for software engineers preparing for
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Why is The Uber App So Large?? (From an ex-Uber mobile engineer & manager)
The Uber app takes up over 300 MB of storage, which seems excessive for what appears to be a simple interface, but the size reflects enormous behind-the-scenes
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A Philosophy of Software Design: Book Review and Verdict
A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout is a short, focused book arguing that software design is fundamentally about managing complexity, and it
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Performance Review: Biases that Could Hurt You and How to Counter Them (from a Manager)
Performance reviews are often shaped by unconscious biases that can make feedback unfair, vague, or misleading. This episode breaks down eight common biases